Vine's New Kids App Is Friendly For Younger Audiences

Many viral Vine videos contain profanity or adult humor, but the video app company has launched a new Vine Kids app that gives children a way to watch family-friendly content. The Vine Kids app includes videos that feature animated characters, funny animals and Sesame Street clips. A new Vine is played when the user swipes videos to the left. It also plays fun sounds every time the user taps the screen.

Vine is a mobile video sharing service that launched in June 2012 and was acquired by
Twitter in October 2012 for a reported $30 million. Vine is known for letting users record and edit looping video clips that are up to six seconds. You can “revine” video clips if you like them so that they show up in the feeds of the friends that follow you.

“The idea came about during an office conversation in early January,” said Twitter’s head of communication and marketing Carolyn Penner in a blog post. “One of my colleagues was talking about how much his two-year-old daughter loves Vine –– he said he wished there was a separate app she could use to more easily watch posts that are appropriate for kids.” The idea came up during Hack Week, which is when Twitter’s staff can work on projects that are out of the day-to-day work.

The Vine Kids app is available for iOS and can be downloaded from the Apple App Store. The app is recommended for kids 5 and under. It is unknown whether an Android app will be coming soon. Fortunately, you do not need to create a Vine account to see the Vine Kids videos.

Vine Kids / Credit: Twitter

Earlier this week, Twitter also added the ability for users to upload video clips that are up to 30 seconds. Twitter product director Jinen Kamdar said that the addition of Twitter Video would not affect Vine because they have different use cases. Vine is considered “short-form entertainment,” whereas Twitter Video could be used for breaking news and offering first-hand perspectives of major events.

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